Tea Party Patriotism

I wouldn’t want to tell you that the majority of the people I saw at this morning’s tea party were such hard-core patriots that they felt the need to walk around waving flags of treason and slavery:

Still it did strike me as noteworthy that your basic tea party crowd isn’t the sort of crowd in which a Confederate flag is unwelcome. I feel like if you’d tried to bring this to a health care rally, folks would have gotten upset. But the tea parties, like a lot of big time conservative events, are a very racism friendly environment. This guy, for example, clearly isn’t so much the type to march with a racist shirt on as he is the kind of guy who’d march with a shirt ridiculing the idea of anti-racism:

As was the case with the bulk of the protesters, there was very little sense that anyone had any actual specific complaint with Obama’s health care proposals. That one woman loves the confederacy. This guy thinks guns are great and diversity is stupid. Many protesters feel that abortion is murder and/or that Barack Obama is in league with terrorists. But nobody had a sign urging the president to adopt more stringent cost control measures, or slamming the concept of regulations to require insurers to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.